As the earlier poster said, it is the consumer who ultimately decides standards, not the software community or the standards bodies.
Oh, right, Reggie. It's "the consumers" that decided on the random set of features and bug fixes added in Windows 98. It's what the customers demand! Never mind that the primary customers for Windows 98 are the OEMs, and Microsoft in general treats them like what you're full of. That's what they demand, too, I guess. Everybody really, really wants "integrated IE" that they can't get rid of even if they want to. Bill sent out a customer survey to each and ever PC user, and that's what they asked for. Nobody was much interested in an OS that sucked less. What they really wanted was to be able to do is watch TV on their PCs.
This, of course, is totally aside from the contradiction that Mike Milde pointed out, in the sentence before you said Microsoft sets the standards. Oh, I get it, the consumers like being told where they want to go, just like the OEMs. Bill's wired in like the old stories about Harry Cohn.
There's a famous story about movie mogul Harry Cohn declaring proudly that he could tell whether a movie was any good or not by how much his fanny twitched while he was watching it. (Herman J. Mankiewicz's summary response? "Imagine -- the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!")
(quoted from anansi.panix.com, but the story is widespread)
So, I guess the whole world's wired into Bill's butt too, right? And Bill can tell they all really, really like the standard Microsoft maintenance procedure of reformat, reinstall. Just like he could tell "the consumers" really wanted to buy the grotty old Windows95 retail release, until Windows98 was ready. You know, the OS formerly known as Windows 97? A more honest title would have been OSR3. Of course, "the consumers" never much cared for that OSR junk the OEMs insisted on. If they did, Bill would have sold it to them in the stores.
Cheers, Dan. |
